Animal Life news stories

Teenage T rexes and other carnivorous dinosaurs the size of lions or bears may have crowded out smaller species, explaining why there are so few of them preserved in the fossil record, research suggests.

The water-to-land transition is a leap in the history of vertebrate evolution and one of the most important scientific issues in vertebrate evolution. Previous studies have shown that vertebrate landing occurred in bony fishes.

Thomas Cody Prang, assistant professor of anthropology, and colleagues examined the skeletal remains of Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”), dated to 4.4 million years old and found in Ethiopia. One of Ardi’s hands was exceptionally well-preserved.

Researchers are building a growing (and glowing) list of fluorescent mammals, and a new addition, an endearing jumping rodent called the springhare, just leapt into the spotlight, its brown fur lighting up in swirling disco patterns of pink and orange under ultraviolet (UV) rays.

In Wonderland, Alice drank a potion to shrink herself. In nature, some animal species shrink to escape the attention of human hunters, a process that takes from decades to millennia.

Artwork that had adorned the walls of an Egyptian prince’s tomb for more than four millennia has been found to contain images of a bird completely unknown to modern science – until now.

The rodents are often considered ‘nuisance animals’, but they can play a vital role in maintaining healthy landscapes

A life size kangaroo painted in red ochre around 17,300 years ago is Australia’s oldest known rock art. This indicates that the earliest style of rock art in Australia focused on animals, similar to the early cave art found in Indonesia and Europe.

Scientists have successfully sequenced the genome of an extinct cave bear using a 360,000-year-old bone—the oldest genome of any organism from a non-permafrost environment.

The most recent reversal of Earth’s magnetic field may have been as recent as 42,000 years ago, according to a new analysis of fossilised tree rings.

Permafrost-preserved teeth, up to 1.6 million years old, identify a new kind of mammoth in Siberia.

Earlier studies have suggested that growing numbers of “big-game” hunting humans in the Americas some 14,000 years ago led to large mammals being wiped out.

Image from: Merikanto (Wiki Commons)

Fungi have been discovered making fake flowers that look and even smell like the real thing, fooling bees and other pollinating insects into visiting them.

A “sungrazed” comet may be responsible for the extinction event around 66 million years ago.

The fish on antidepressants seemed to lose their capability for individuality as a result of their exposure, with variations in behaviour between separate animals diminishing as the dose got stronger.

The inadvertent discovery of sea life on a boulder beneath an Antarctic ice shelf challenges our understanding of how organisms can live in environments far from sunlight, according to a team of biologists.